Random Comment Picker For YouTube Giveaways

Everyone with a YouTube channel knows the importance of driving constant engagement. If you want to build and retain a strong presence on the platform then producing high quality content on a consistent basis is a must, but it's also a good move to make some extra efforts to ensure you're maximising engagement.

One of the best strategies you can implement to achieve this is running contests or giveaways from inside your videos. You can announce your giveaway at the end of some of your regular content, or you can devote an entire video to it.

This is a fantastic way to engage your audience, cultivate a strong sense of community, give your audience more reason to keep tuning in, and even attract new viewers.

One of the best ways you can run a giveaway from a YouTube video is getting viewers to leave a comment to enter, and randomly drawing a winner from your comments.

While setting up this kind of giveaway is quick and easy, drawing a winner can be a challenge. While there are random YouTube comment pickers such as Comment Picker, YouTube RCP, and Sandra Cires YouTube Random Comment Picker available online, they have several significant limitations.

Or if you have an exported list of all the @usernames or Comments you can use our Random Comment List Picker to put them all into a list and just generate the winner.

This includes difficulties preventing spam entries, inability to validate entries, and not allowing you to maintain a record of your entry collection and winner drawing process.

There are a couple of ways you can overcome these issues:

• You can manually record every valid entry yourself and enter them into a random list picker (this will take far too much time and effort).
• You can use a giveaway app like Gleam Competitions. This will give you the power to limit users to single or periodical entries, validate winners to ensure they're complying with any comment requirements you may have, boost transparency and reliability with records of entries and winners, and even drive additional powerful actions.

With Gleam's powerful import actions you can easily set up a campaign that will automatically collect comments as entries and allow you to instantly pick random winners.

All you have to do is select the YouTube Comments import action, connect your YouTube account, and provide the link to the video you want to import comments from. It's that simple.

Once your campaign is up and running viewers who comment on your video will be awarded an entry and given a chance to win your prize.

With Gleam you can even filter entries by hashtags or words. This means that you can require users to incclude a designated hashtag or word in their comment in order for their entry to be valid which is a great way to help ensure entrants are following your submission guidelines.

Your campaign will have a single entry interval by default, which means each individual user will only get one entry regardless of how many comments they leave. If you want to allow users to get more entries for leaving more comments you can simply change your entry interval to hourly, daily, weekly or unlimited depending on how often you want to let users enter.

This will help you prevent users from spamming the comments and unfairly shifting the odds in their favour.

Once you're ready to wrap things up all you need to do is head to the Winners tab of your Gleam campaign and click Draw Winners. You'll then be able to instantly select a winner at random and reach out to them to let them with their prize.

When you pick winners with Gleam you can even invalidate any entries you draw if they don't comply with your giveaway requirements, and redraw a new winner. This is great if you're tasking users with commenting something specific such as an answer to a question or some feedback on your channel.

If you want your giveaway to be as effective as possible then you need to make sure that you're announcing and promoting it.

First off, you always need to make sure you're announcing your giveaway in the YouTube video itself, and its description. Let people know what the prize is, that all they have to do to enter is leave a comment, and some specifications such as when entries close, and if their comments have to meet any requirements.

You should also reference your giveaway in the title of your video. This will make it clear that your video contains a giveaway and give your existing subscribers and potential new viewers alike more reason to click your video and check out your content.

Comment contests can also help you drive more external traffic to your video. When you share links to your video across various social media channels users will be a lot more inclined to check it out if they know there's a giveaway involved.

This can be a great way to encourage relevant new users to check out your video, and if they like what they see there's a good chance they'll come back for more.

Another great perk of using Gleam to run your comment contests is that you have the ability to collect entry comments from across multiple videos and draw a winner from the entire pool of entrants.

With this approach you can offer more entries and a greater chance of winning to users who comment on more of your videos. This is a fantastic way to encourage your existing audience to keep tuning in, and incentivise new viewers to watch more of your content and give yourself a greater chance of converting them into fans.

All you need to do to set up this type of campaign is create a different YouTube Comments import action for every video involved. You can add more actions as your campaign progresses so you can keep adding new videos to the mix.

With Gleam you can also use your YouTube giveaway to drive a bunch of other valuable actions including newsletter subscriptions, social media engagement and a whole lot more.

You can run these giveaways by not only tasking users with commenting on your videos, but also using your videos, descriptions, and social media posts to link off to a giveaway page where users can complete more actions for more chances to win.

Take a look at this demo we put together to see some of the additional actions you could drive:

Adding extra actions won't prevent viewers from easily entering by leaving a comment, but it will give you the opportunity to drive some highly valuable actions from engaged users who are willing to take further action to boost their odds of winning.

You'll be able to drive these additional actions by linking off to a giveaway page from your video's description, as well as through your social media channels.

If you don't have a website to run the campaign on you don't need to stress, you can run the campaign on one of our stylish hosted landing pages and send entrants there.

Ready To Run Your Own YouTube Giveaway?

Take a look at our Competitions app and start running your own powerful YouTube Comment Contests!